I couldn’t help it — today I was seized by an overwhelming desire for a rice ball filled with canned salmon and chopped kimchi, and I even waited to eat lunch until the rice was ready — but damn it if that rice didn’t collapse all over the place as soon as I picked up my nice pressed, molded treat. I have been buying the short-grain brown rice from Whole Foods. It’s tasty and easy to acquire in the course of normal food-gathering. However, I find that it is utterly useless for making onigiri — the grains don’t stick together for crap. This confuses me, because the grains are the same shape as the white short-grain rice I use for less-diet-friendly onigiri. However, that white rice I bought at the Korean market, so perhaps they are not the same varieties of rice despite their similarities. I would prefer, of course, to just buy one kind of brown rice, since it keeps much less well than white rice, but I guess I better trot over to the Koreans and see if they have any brown rice that can be used for my fiberrific rice balls. Or is it just that brown rice doesn’t work for this application? Maki at JustHungry claims that it does…
so, after multi-lingual and gestural conferencing with the lady proprietor of Dae Han market and one of her customers, including diagramming onigiri on the back of a grocery receipt, we worked out that sweet brown rice is what I should use for making brown rice onigiri. I never thought to use that because way back when I accidentally bought sweet white rice and it came out all gloppy — good for sweet rice desserts but terrible for onigiri. I have made one batch so far, and it sticks together just like rice at Korean and Japanese restaurants. Didn’t make rice balls from that batch but I will with the next batch, and I have high hopes for success!